Maternity Dresses

Oh, maternity dresses.  How difficult it has been for me to develop affection for you.  You always make me feel frumpy, with your empire waists and excess material.  I never had anything against empire waistlines before, but now they seem to be very unflattering.  I guess there aren't a lot of ways to flatter a basketball attached to your spine.

In any case, a few weeks ago I need to shop for a maternity dress to wear to all of the weddings and showers that we had coming up this summer.  I found this awesome Pea In A Pod dress, which was originally $165, but on sale for $40.  I was so excited!!!

These are horrible pictures, but look at how cute this dress is!

It has pleats in the front along the belly, so it's more fitted instead of just hanging on my stomach.  The busy pattern also helps to conceal the basketball.

From the front I feel like you can barely even tell that I am 6 months pregnant (at the time that this picture was taken.)

From the side view it's definitely a little more obvious, but if you can get hideous yellow hue of this photo, I think you'll agree that it's pretty darn flattering.

I wore this dress to DH's brother's wedding in Kentucky, and I felt great.  Sadly I didn't get any pictures of the two of us though, except for this one, where I look pretty awful.

But even more sadly is what happened after the wedding.

I came home from Kentucky and promptly threw all of my clothes into the washer.  This dress didn't feel like it was any sort of special material and I had no reason to think that it would need special treatment, although the $165 price tag should have tipped me off.

Well, I learned a little thing or two about a material called "rayon" - turns out, you shouldn't put it in the washing machine.  My cute little $165-but-on-sale-for-$40 dress that I only wore once shrunk up so small that it was about half the size of the original dress.  After it dried completely it had stretched out completely but it was about 3 inches shorter and quite snug.  I was devastated.  Especially since I had decided that the dried version was as good as the original and packed it for our first baby shower without trying it on again, and needless to say, I was self conscious the entire time.  (Hopefully that didn't show too much.)  I'll post some pictures of the "after" dress at some point so that you can see what I mean, but trust me when I say "READ THOSE CARE LABELS." 

You can thank me later.